Category: Art

Conniffe and Norvartis Prizes

The annual conference of the Irish Economic Association was held on the 10th and 11th of May at the Central Bank. More than 160 people attended the conference.

Alejandra Ramos (TCD) was awarded the Conniffe Prize for best paper by a young economist at the conference. Alejandra received the prize for her paper titled “Household Decision Making with Violence: Implications for Transfer Programs”.

Benjamin Elsner (UCD) and Florin Wozny (IZA) won the Novartis prize for the best paper in Health Economics at the conference. The winning paper was titled ” The human capital cost of radiation: Long run evidence from exposure outside the womb”

Prof Wendy Carlin (UCL) and CORE gave the ESR lecture “The Econ 101 paradigm is broken – what is the alternative?” Her slides from the talk

IEA Dublin ESR Guest Lecture 2018

Prof Olivier Blanchard (Peterson Institute) gave the Edgeworth lecture “Should we reject the natural rate hypothesis” His slides from the talk

Edgeworth Lecture IEA 2018

On the IEA website there are plenty of pictures from the conference

http://www.iea.ie/category/latest-news/

Gerard O’Reilly

Fishamble’s “Guaranteed!” by Colin Murphy on national tour

via Gavin Kostick in comments, earlier

Fishamble’s production of ‘Guaranteed!’ by Colin Murphy is back on national tour, starting at Kilkenomics this Friday. First panel discussion includes Bill Black and Dan Ariely.

http://fishamble.com/guaranteed

Data journalism handbook

Via the excellent Flowing data, an interesting free guidebook: the Data Journalism Handbook.

Worth a look, including for the link to a rather good interactive data visualisation from the New York Times of 2009 “The Jobless Rate for People Like You“.

Globalisation

Buck Mulligan’s ambition was to “Hellenise Ireland”.  Progress is reported here.   Can his  epitaph be written at last?

The Use of Metaphor in the Irish Economy, A Guest Post by Gavin Kostick

John Donne is remembered on the blog by the phrase, “no man is an island” indicating, a good deal before Adam Smith, the interconnectedness of our lives. Donne (1572 – 1631) was the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, and a metaphysical poet. He specialized in drawing unexpected comparisons between a theoretical, spiritual or abstract notion and a concrete, palpable object. For example, Donne compared mutual love to a pair of mapping compasses, which, where-ever the points are placed on the surface of the world, lean towards each other and are connected.

The history of language itself is the history of the movement from the concrete to the abstract. Our ancestors had a far larger vocabulary than we do, as they were more particular than general.

The power of metaphor consists in making the abstract once again visceral: philosophy ‘proved upon our pulses’, in Keats’s phrase.

But it is a suspect power as it may not so much illuminate, as rhetorically persuade, or falsify.

The history of political and economic thinking is filled with metaphoric physicalisation of abstract ideas – from Hobbes’s “war of all against all”, Smith’s “invisible hand”, Marx’s “spectre haunting Europe”, right up to Matt Taibbi’s “great vampire squid”, powerful gut images have managed to consolidate a set of ideas, capture the public imagination, frame debate.

Rarely a thread of the blog goes by without some arresting image. The following is necessarily a swift and limited survey of some of the kinds of imagery used during the Irish economic crisis so far, followed by some thoughts towards a fresh set of images that might be explored.

Continue reading “The Use of Metaphor in the Irish Economy, A Guest Post by Gavin Kostick”